The sad truth is that Linux is not taken seriously for audio work at the moment, even though the ALSA system is quite excellent and the latency of 1.x is lower than both Windows and OSX.
You won't find a driver for that hardware, since it uses a special inteface and special software that is closed source. Yamaha has no interest in writing that software for Linux.
On the other hand, it's such an obscure device, it's not really a priority for most people. Windows and OSX are the best solutions for people like you, that need specialized support for music hardware and software (for the time being).
I use Evolution with the Exchange server at work, and it does a pretty good job. The calender and groupware features seem to work just fine, and it can even use directory system as well.
Wheather or not it is worthwhile is solely based on how it is implemented. Exchange accounts are done on a per-seat license, so you have to pay no matter what. This means, however, that you have the option of using alternative platforms instead of paying for Windows licenses though. You can save money on the OS and office suite by using Linux in conjunction with OO.o and Evolution. Ximian/Novell may be directing their efforts towards OSX versions of Evolution as well (according to a rep I saw about 2 weeks ago). The process of being able to slowly move away from Windows, while keeping all of the major groupware features really *does* allow you to save money, and possibly move to other alternatives. Unfortunately, there are not any viable opensource groupware alternatives at the moment. So you're going to pay for something like the groupware software from Novell or IBM.
Your USB devices are not "distro dependent", but are "kernel dependent". There is no reason that it might work on one distribution and not on another. Nearly all of those USB storage devices use the standard USB mass storage protocol, and don't require any specialized drivers.
I, for one, have never had a "30 minute Windows install." It takes 30 minutes just to install device drivers... Install 4-in-one/nForce driver. Reboot. Install video driver. Reboot. Install audio driver. Reboot. Install CD burning software. Reboot. Install NAT/Firewall. Reboot. Install antivirus software. Reboot. Install 250 service packs. Reboot reboot reboot Reboot Reboot Reboot.
You're never done with Windows in 30 minutes. With Slackware, for me, it's a 20 minute install, 5 minutes of configuration (including installation of nVidia's driver), and 10 minutes to install Dropline Gnome - then I'm DONE for another year, except for a handful of programs or regular ALSA driver updates and occasional Gnome updates. Did I mention that this could be done WITHOUT a reboot (after initial install of Slackware)?
Mr. Project and Gnome Planner are decent alternatives. Granted, they don't have all of the (often useless) features of MS Project, but they still do the job just fine in terms of making charts and doing scheduling/tracking.
The unfortunate fact is that neither can import MS Project files at the moment. That said, it's not a common thing to be tossing around to co-workers *unlike DOC files).
Yes I was. I had to disable the extra specialized framebuffers though, like nVidia/ATI specific. I kept it simple and left only "Vesa/VGA graphics support". On my first attempt, it started with a blank screen, when I enabled some of the other modules as well. Simplifying it seemed to fix the problem.
If you'd like, I can post a copy of my ".config" file so that you may see the options that I used.
I first started using Slack with DragonLinux, years ago. DragonLinux was Slackware that installed to a loopback filesystem on a FAT partition. It worked out quite well, but disk access times were not too great. I finally graduation to Slackware around the release of 7.0. It was a breath of fresh air after banging my head on the desk due to idiotic Redhat/Mandrake designs. Of course, those have improved quite a bit over the years. I still prefer Slackware on all of my machines though. It's fast and stable, and I really like the BSD-style init system.
I'm currently using 2.6.6 with Slackware 9.1, but I noticed this too... While it works fine, the hotplug system seems to not work as well as it did with 2.4.22. Most specifically, ALSA seems to act a little goofy, but it's nothing that can't be fixed by adding a specific init command to load the proper modules. As for the rest of the important stuff (power management, networking, etc.) - I just built all of that into the kernel instead of making it into modules.
You obviously haven't tried the codec then... It's pretty impressive from a quality standpoint, especially for the file sizes.
My only complaint is in the amount of power it takes to decode really high quality files. It certainly puts a heavy load on the machine. Less than 1 GHz may be too slow to play the samples on the Theora page, but of course - it's in an Alpha state and they'll work the kinks out.
This announcement seems to indicate that the format has stablized, even if the reference codecs haven't.
To add to my post... I just tested the codec with some sample videos I've found, and I must say that the quality is VERY impressive for the size of the files. My only complaint is in the CPU load that is produced while decoding. The high-res samples on theora.org produced about 50-60% CPU load on my Athlon XP 2400+ through MPlayer. The quality certainly looked as about good as any DVDs I've been watching.
Lot's of people are already using the OGG container for video, even if they aren't using Theora for the video. If you haven't seen it on newsgroups, it's a growing trend to see the OGG container.
I also use FLAC (which is part of the OGG project now) for all of my music library.
I use Ogg/Vorbis for all of my lossy compression files.
If Ogg/Thera is as good or better than the DIVX files you currently use, then why wouldn't you use it? What have you got to lose if you've got the codec installed?
Having a patent/royalty-free video codec is a GOOD thing.
This crash most definitely works. I tested it on my freshly built 2.6.6 kernel and it locked the whole machine up; just totally freezes it. This was as a standard user.
I suppose it is not a problem since I don't allow shell access to my machines, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to patch anyway.
"See, the problem I have with Linux is that so many of these asshats want to compare it feature for feature against Windows."
Gee... Let's not completely contradict ourselves, now. Why can I compare Windows 2000 or XP to Gnome 2.6? Because Gnome is finally getting most of the same features that people like you complained about not having. What? Do you expect me to compare Gnome 1.4 to Windows 2000? Get real.
It's so great that this "article" totally feeds trolls like you. I bet you're loving it - talking out of your ass.
This takes me back to something like RedHat 5 in 1997 when Linux desktops were largely unusable and combersome. Let's not forget that it didn't;
-Support Truetype fonts -Support antialising -Support international text -Support magnifiers/screenreaders/onscreen keyboards -Support real-time desktop modules like GDesklets -Render window content movement in real-time -Have a file manager and desktop that renders thumbnails of HTML/text/Video/etc. in real-time -And more...
Windowmaker doesn't do most of that, and Windows 95 doesn't do some of it either.
If you want the features that the big boys have, it is going to cost some resources.
I was overexaggerating, merely for the point that features cost a lot of resources. Something like Blackbox or Windowmaker simply do not have the feature-set of something like Gnome (or even XFCE).
Like the rest of us are supposed to lose features because you are too cheap to upgrade your hardware? Sorry. I certainly don't agree. As the original post mentioned, there are desktops for people like you, XFCE/BLACKBOX/ICEWM, which are like 20 year old UNIX desktops that will run great on antiquated hardware.
Eh? That may be your experience, but my "inferior" Gnome box at work is much faster than the "superior" Windows 2000 box that is right across from it.
Gnome 2.6 is quite fast on my P3 450. The Windows machine takes like 10 minutes to load.
On Linux, it's a matter of having a no-nonsense distribution (like Slackware), and making sure all of the bullshit (useless) daemons aren't running - like they do on a typical Mandrake or RedHat install... You don't have web and ftp servers running out of the box on a Windows 200 desktop.
I wouldn't blame the newer KDE or Gnome releases. They only require more power because that's what people want; an environent that has Windows-like features and capabilities that are often expected in a modern and easy-to-use desktop. The same could be said for Mac OS X, which requires reasonable amounts of power to perform nicely as well.
I run Gnome 2.6 on a PC with a 450 MHz P3 and 256 MB of RAM, which is piddly by today's standards. It runs fine.
An no.... Windows 2000 is not "very quick" with 128 MB of RAM, it swaps in and out very frequently. It's only reasonable if you have at least a 7200 RPM hard drive.
As for the original post on the subject, XFCE is great if you want the look and features of a 20-year old UNIX interface... That's exactly what it is, which is why it runs so well on older hardware. Gnome is carefully written and runs fast for what it does, so it's not fair to complain about it if you are on hardware that is half a decade old and are trying to use a desktop of 2004.
This is such a tired and silly subject... People complain when they don't even know how Linux uses shared and caches memory when they see the system monitor and scream (on IRC): "Why is t3h Gnomer terminal using 15 MB!!!!111 OMIGOSH!!111 T3H Epiphany is using 104 MB!!!111"... Bah. Get real.
Same here. I've used it for about 2 months now with 3 graphics cards; Rage 128 with opensource drivers, Radeon 9500 PRO with ATI's drivers, and an nVidia GeForce FX 5900 XT with nVidia's drivers. All have worked well.
XV overlay support is broken in X.org at the moment (as well as XF86 4.4, to my knowledge). There will be occasional problems with DRI based cards, and nVidia cards will exhibit a blue display when you play your first movie after a reboot.
You don't need to wait on nVidia since X.org and XF86 are virtually the same. The nVidia driver set works fine with X.org. I'm using it with an FX 5900 XT without any problems.
The only difference is that you'll need to configure an "xorg.conf" file instead of an "XF86Config" file.
I just find it to be more enjoyable because there are no surprises. Slackware works well for me. There are no virus problems, practically no crashes or freezes, no spyware...
It does what I need it to do; music sounds great, the (limited) games are good for killing time, Openoffice meets all of my needs for word processing, and pr0n plays fine through XINE and MPlayer.
Plus, it gives me an excuse to tell people that "I've not used Windows at home for two years. I can't help you with your exlpoit/virus/adware/crash problem".
Slashdot Mirror
The sad truth is that Linux is not taken seriously for audio work at the moment, even though the ALSA system is quite excellent and the latency of 1.x is lower than both Windows and OSX.
You won't find a driver for that hardware, since it uses a special inteface and special software that is closed source. Yamaha has no interest in writing that software for Linux.
On the other hand, it's such an obscure device, it's not really a priority for most people. Windows and OSX are the best solutions for people like you, that need specialized support for music hardware and software (for the time being).
I use Evolution with the Exchange server at work, and it does a pretty good job. The calender and groupware features seem to work just fine, and it can even use directory system as well.
Wheather or not it is worthwhile is solely based on how it is implemented. Exchange accounts are done on a per-seat license, so you have to pay no matter what. This means, however, that you have the option of using alternative platforms instead of paying for Windows licenses though. You can save money on the OS and office suite by using Linux in conjunction with OO.o and Evolution. Ximian/Novell may be directing their efforts towards OSX versions of Evolution as well (according to a rep I saw about 2 weeks ago). The process of being able to slowly move away from Windows, while keeping all of the major groupware features really *does* allow you to save money, and possibly move to other alternatives. Unfortunately, there are not any viable opensource groupware alternatives at the moment. So you're going to pay for something like the groupware software from Novell or IBM.
Your USB devices are not "distro dependent", but are "kernel dependent". There is no reason that it might work on one distribution and not on another. Nearly all of those USB storage devices use the standard USB mass storage protocol, and don't require any specialized drivers.
I, for one, have never had a "30 minute Windows install." It takes 30 minutes just to install device drivers... Install 4-in-one/nForce driver. Reboot. Install video driver. Reboot. Install audio driver. Reboot. Install CD burning software. Reboot. Install NAT/Firewall. Reboot. Install antivirus software. Reboot. Install 250 service packs. Reboot reboot reboot Reboot Reboot Reboot.
You're never done with Windows in 30 minutes. With Slackware, for me, it's a 20 minute install, 5 minutes of configuration (including installation of nVidia's driver), and 10 minutes to install Dropline Gnome - then I'm DONE for another year, except for a handful of programs or regular ALSA driver updates and occasional Gnome updates. Did I mention that this could be done WITHOUT a reboot (after initial install of Slackware)?
Mr. Project and Gnome Planner are decent alternatives. Granted, they don't have all of the (often useless) features of MS Project, but they still do the job just fine in terms of making charts and doing scheduling/tracking.
r .imendio.org/
http://mrproject.codefactory.se/
http://planne
The unfortunate fact is that neither can import MS Project files at the moment. That said, it's not a common thing to be tossing around to co-workers *unlike DOC files).
Yes I was. I had to disable the extra specialized framebuffers though, like nVidia/ATI specific. I kept it simple and left only "Vesa/VGA graphics support". On my first attempt, it started with a blank screen, when I enabled some of the other modules as well. Simplifying it seemed to fix the problem.
If you'd like, I can post a copy of my ".config" file so that you may see the options that I used.
I first started using Slack with DragonLinux, years ago. DragonLinux was Slackware that installed to a loopback filesystem on a FAT partition. It worked out quite well, but disk access times were not too great. I finally graduation to Slackware around the release of 7.0. It was a breath of fresh air after banging my head on the desk due to idiotic Redhat/Mandrake designs. Of course, those have improved quite a bit over the years. I still prefer Slackware on all of my machines though. It's fast and stable, and I really like the BSD-style init system.
I'm currently using 2.6.6 with Slackware 9.1, but I noticed this too... While it works fine, the hotplug system seems to not work as well as it did with 2.4.22. Most specifically, ALSA seems to act a little goofy, but it's nothing that can't be fixed by adding a specific init command to load the proper modules. As for the rest of the important stuff (power management, networking, etc.) - I just built all of that into the kernel instead of making it into modules.
You obviously haven't tried the codec then... It's pretty impressive from a quality standpoint, especially for the file sizes.
My only complaint is in the amount of power it takes to decode really high quality files. It certainly puts a heavy load on the machine. Less than 1 GHz may be too slow to play the samples on the Theora page, but of course - it's in an Alpha state and they'll work the kinks out.
This announcement seems to indicate that the format has stablized, even if the reference codecs haven't.
That's like saying that "Closed source sucks" because WMA/WMV play better on Windows...
Wait a minute. They don't. Maybe there's a pattern here.
To add to my post... I just tested the codec with some sample videos I've found, and I must say that the quality is VERY impressive for the size of the files. My only complaint is in the CPU load that is produced while decoding. The high-res samples on theora.org produced about 50-60% CPU load on my Athlon XP 2400+ through MPlayer. The quality certainly looked as about good as any DVDs I've been watching.
Lot's of people are already using the OGG container for video, even if they aren't using Theora for the video. If you haven't seen it on newsgroups, it's a growing trend to see the OGG container.
I also use FLAC (which is part of the OGG project now) for all of my music library.
I use Ogg/Vorbis for all of my lossy compression files.
If Ogg/Thera is as good or better than the DIVX files you currently use, then why wouldn't you use it? What have you got to lose if you've got the codec installed?
Having a patent/royalty-free video codec is a GOOD thing.
This crash most definitely works. I tested it on my freshly built 2.6.6 kernel and it locked the whole machine up; just totally freezes it. This was as a standard user.
I suppose it is not a problem since I don't allow shell access to my machines, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to patch anyway.
15 years old and still people complainging that Gnome 2 runs like molasses on it.
"See, the problem I have with Linux is that so many of these asshats want to compare it feature for feature against Windows."
Gee... Let's not completely contradict ourselves, now. Why can I compare Windows 2000 or XP to Gnome 2.6? Because Gnome is finally getting most of the same features that people like you complained about not having. What? Do you expect me to compare Gnome 1.4 to Windows 2000? Get real.
It's so great that this "article" totally feeds trolls like you. I bet you're loving it - talking out of your ass.
Oh, please... Windowmaker?
http://www.windowmaker.org/gallery.html
This takes me back to something like RedHat 5 in 1997 when Linux desktops were largely unusable and combersome. Let's not forget that it didn't;
-Support Truetype fonts
-Support antialising
-Support international text
-Support magnifiers/screenreaders/onscreen keyboards
-Support real-time desktop modules like GDesklets
-Render window content movement in real-time
-Have a file manager and desktop that renders thumbnails of HTML/text/Video/etc. in real-time
-And more...
Windowmaker doesn't do most of that, and Windows 95 doesn't do some of it either.
If you want the features that the big boys have, it is going to cost some resources.
I was overexaggerating, merely for the point that features cost a lot of resources. Something like Blackbox or Windowmaker simply do not have the feature-set of something like Gnome (or even XFCE).
Like the rest of us are supposed to lose features because you are too cheap to upgrade your hardware? Sorry. I certainly don't agree. As the original post mentioned, there are desktops for people like you, XFCE/BLACKBOX/ICEWM, which are like 20 year old UNIX desktops that will run great on antiquated hardware.
Eh? That may be your experience, but my "inferior" Gnome box at work is much faster than the "superior" Windows 2000 box that is right across from it.
Gnome 2.6 is quite fast on my P3 450. The Windows machine takes like 10 minutes to load.
On Linux, it's a matter of having a no-nonsense distribution (like Slackware), and making sure all of the bullshit (useless) daemons aren't running - like they do on a typical Mandrake or RedHat install... You don't have web and ftp servers running out of the box on a Windows 200 desktop.
I wouldn't blame the newer KDE or Gnome releases. They only require more power because that's what people want; an environent that has Windows-like features and capabilities that are often expected in a modern and easy-to-use desktop. The same could be said for Mac OS X, which requires reasonable amounts of power to perform nicely as well.
I run Gnome 2.6 on a PC with a 450 MHz P3 and 256 MB of RAM, which is piddly by today's standards. It runs fine.
An no.... Windows 2000 is not "very quick" with 128 MB of RAM, it swaps in and out very frequently. It's only reasonable if you have at least a 7200 RPM hard drive.
As for the original post on the subject, XFCE is great if you want the look and features of a 20-year old UNIX interface... That's exactly what it is, which is why it runs so well on older hardware. Gnome is carefully written and runs fast for what it does, so it's not fair to complain about it if you are on hardware that is half a decade old and are trying to use a desktop of 2004.
This is such a tired and silly subject... People complain when they don't even know how Linux uses shared and caches memory when they see the system monitor and scream (on IRC): "Why is t3h Gnomer terminal using 15 MB!!!!111 OMIGOSH!!111 T3H Epiphany is using 104 MB!!!111"... Bah. Get real.
Same here. I've used it for about 2 months now with 3 graphics cards; Rage 128 with opensource drivers, Radeon 9500 PRO with ATI's drivers, and an nVidia GeForce FX 5900 XT with nVidia's drivers. All have worked well.
XV overlay support is broken in X.org at the moment (as well as XF86 4.4, to my knowledge). There will be occasional problems with DRI based cards, and nVidia cards will exhibit a blue display when you play your first movie after a reboot.
You don't need to wait on nVidia since X.org and XF86 are virtually the same. The nVidia driver set works fine with X.org. I'm using it with an FX 5900 XT without any problems.
The only difference is that you'll need to configure an "xorg.conf" file instead of an "XF86Config" file.
All I can say is... Wow... UNIX-nerd's dream machine.
I just find it to be more enjoyable because there are no surprises. Slackware works well for me. There are no virus problems, practically no crashes or freezes, no spyware...
It does what I need it to do; music sounds great, the (limited) games are good for killing time, Openoffice meets all of my needs for word processing, and pr0n plays fine through XINE and MPlayer.
Plus, it gives me an excuse to tell people that "I've not used Windows at home for two years. I can't help you with your exlpoit/virus/adware/crash problem".
They're basing it off of PXES.
http://pxes.sourceforge.net/
It's a pretty good solution for connecting to all sorts of terminal servers.
Actually, instead of "XF86Config-4", the standard name is now "xorg.conf".